Technology With a Human Touch: The Workforce of the Future Is Wired Differently
Challenge your assumptions about how people and technology work together in this series co-created by Boston Consulting Group and Bloomberg Media Studios.
Artificial intelligence and other technologies can provide the tools necessary to empower each person in your company to innovate like a rockstar CTO.
But is that enough?
Reimagining how AI and other technologies can unleash human ingenuity and creativity requires a complete change of mindset and culture.
To be successful, you must encourage and embrace edgy ideas, and, most importantly, have the grit to adapt and change quickly.
AI @ scale
Companies can gain a competitive advantage by scaling artificial intelligence but leaders need to invest in humans to make it stick.
Everyone’s job
must change
Technology can’t replace essential human strengths such as creativity, vision, and ethical judgment, but it enables people to solve problems at greater scale and speed. The relationship works the other way around, too. Companies can reskill employees teaching them new methods and ways of working. “With assessment and a narrow reskilling, many workers can fill digital roles,” says Deborah Lovich, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG.
The 3 keys to digital success
People
Meanwhile, adopting a platform-style model encourages communication and collaboration among teams across departments; gone are the silos that isolated teams from one another. A clear mission combined with a shared way of working creates a platform that supports everything from customer-facing processes to operations. At the same time, based on feedback, agile cross-functional teams can build, test, and roll out creative solutions faster.
Investing in people
will pay off.
2x revenue growth • 1.5x higher share price increases and 1.7x higher earnings growth • 90% higher levels of employee engagement.*
Technology is only as powerful as the people who build, use, and improve it. “In our fascination with technology, sometimes we neglect to recognize that the true potential of technology isn’t realized unless you have the human touch. Machines take on routine operations, but we have to infuse human creativity, ethics, and strategic judgment,” says Ashley Grice, CEO of global creative consultancy BCG BrightHouse.
Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of companies fail at digital transformation, partly because they don’t understand how important a role people play. In fact, the lion’s share of investments in technology should go toward people, not machines.
The new
workflow
- Build
- Design hardware, software, algorithms.
- Audit
- Ensure technology-generated decisions are accurate.
- Augment
- Humans provide context for technology and algorithms.
- Co-create
- Humans and technology work together to improve processes, learning from each other.
- Human Touch
- Humans lead relationships and engagement, aligning common purpose and strategy.
A partnership built for better outcomes
Companies that have successfully meshed digital and humans are flexible and faster.
- Quality and team performance improve over time. The goal is to experiment and learn.A company is 155% more likely to be a top performer if it has trained more than 10% of its full-time employees in AI.*
- Rapid exchange in areas of expertise lead to increased employee satisfaction.
- “What” and “How” decisions are delegated to the team.
Organizations with a strong sense of purpose are more than 2x as likely to achieve above-average shareholder returns than those with a low sense of purpose.†
Progress will be impossible without purpose
“Purpose ignites the courage to keep moving forward,” says Grice. Purpose also is a powerful cohesive force that keeps teams united, motivated, and focused, even when they’re working great distances apart.
Real conversations among thinkers, candid debates about ethical guardrails, and groundbreaking ideas forged from creative energy can only come to life when purpose binds an organization together.
So, purpose and strategy must be well defined, communicated, and woven into the fabric of an organization to reap all of the benefits of humans and technology working together.
